Red Hat has announced the “Enterprise Acceleration” initiative designed to help enterprise customers accelerate their transition to a next-generation, open source architecture based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

The strategy, announced at JBoss World Orlando, focuses on expanding the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio through the availability of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and the sponsorship of multiple new open source community projects, including JBoss.org BlackTie.

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, which is expected to be available in Asia Pacific by March 2008, is an open source SOA product offering designed to help enterprises develop business solutions more rapidly and to improve productivity within and across enterprises.

According to the release, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is designed to be simpler, more open and more cost-effective than proprietary SOA platforms. It is intended to increase flexibility in a range of implementations from small-scale integration projects to enterprise-wide SOA integration.

The Platform includes scalable clustering, JEE technologies and a customisable base to meet changing enterprise needs. The platform combines SOA, enterprise application integration (EAI), business process and rule management (BPM) and event-driven architecture (EDA) technologies.

“Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform offers enterprises the opportunity to integrate applications and services, as well as streamline business processes more simply, openly and cost-effectively than with expensive, monolithic proprietary SOA platforms,” said Gery Messer, President, Red Hat Asia Pacific. “This next-generation SOA Platform coupled with the JBoss subscription, can help add significant business and IT value to enterprise SOA integration projects.”

From JBoss World Orlando, Red Hat also announced sponsorship of multiple new open source community projects, including JBoss.org Black Tie, which will enable enterprises to advance open source middleware in their IT infrastructure.

JBoss.org BlackTie is a new project for integrating Java and legacy-based distributed transaction-processing environments. BlackTie will complement and extend the current JBoss transaction monitor project, JBoss.org Transactions, through the addition of C, C++ and mainframe compatible transaction capabilities. This will enable organisations to better integrate and migrate legacy environments with next-generation, Java-based transaction environments.